Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in Mideast

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They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air
but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East's own version of the
Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span
deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new
satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program
in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever
before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures
have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle
with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date
back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found
on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to
70 meters) across. [ See
gallery of wheel structures ]

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are
far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in
the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a
professor of classics and ancient history at the University of
Western Australia.

Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming
issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that
these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These
include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing
animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials);
and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the
landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent
practical use.

His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance
project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As
of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the
structures may have been used for or what meaning they held.
[ History's
Most Overlooked Mysteries ]

Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he
became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read
accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s
on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by
these things," Kennedy said.

Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an
account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported
encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along
with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the
"works of the old men."

"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make
out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said.
"Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes
sharply into focus what the shape is."

The designs must have been clearer when they were originally
built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them,
for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the
shape was."

(The team has created an archive of images of
the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.)

What were they used for?

So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated,
something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose,
more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google
Earth era speculated that they could be the
remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of
these explanations seems to work out well.

"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this
area in which people felt there was a need to build structures
that were circular."

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are
clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis,
hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups.
"Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite
remarkable," Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are
quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all;
others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often
aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the
Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous
spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical
phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number
of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the
spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.

Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they
circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among
the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the
air, like they are associated with
ancient burials.

Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be
prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago.
The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top
of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice
versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the
kites," Kennedy said.

Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino
in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these
structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the
Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on
the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are
geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.

"If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as
worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with
astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same
function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for
instance. The design is different, but the function could be the
same," she wrote in her email.

Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a
mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?"